Vanessa Vaile's List: GED Study Resources

• Designing a MOOC: using social media tools
• depending on your target audience a MOOC can look quite different in design
• If you do not know your MOOC participants upfront, you might want to think about using the most accessible communication tools available. Choosing those tools that will allow the most optimal (= most fluent, easiest, low technological threshold) learning experience is essential if you want to include less tech savvy audiences as well.
• overview of some of the options that are out there and that have been tested in previous MOOC’s
• Google groups or another, similar list-serve
• online tool uses e-mail to keep everyone informed
• works very well for discussions
• Twitter or another micro-blogging site
• allow the group to share short messages with one another. This can be of great use to share not only ideas, but also relevant content from other sources
• works very well for quick item and idea exchange
• Extra bonus: by using hashtags (a hashtag looks like this: #wordX , so incorporating both the # symbol and the word following it) , you can filter all the tweets
• make use of paper.li or other tweet and hashtag based online ‘papers’.
• Backchannels: tweets can also be used as backchannels (real-time online chats between participants to share ideas on synchronous events that are happening).
• A collaborative bookmarking tool, e.g. delicious.com
• to allow everyone to find bookmarked items all gathered in one place.
• A Wiki or any accessible and editable online page
• Other great tools to use:
• Google docs or similar documents that are in the cloud
• An RSS tool
• Virtual synchronous classroom
• And of course also all the well-known Web2.0 tools: Google sites (putting up content in a central website), YouTube (movies), Flickr (picture sharing), netvibes or iGoogle (to put all the resources in one dashboard), Facebook (for social networking),…
• Apart from these possible course resources, the participants must be free to generate content spaces of their own, allowing them to both increase their Personal Learning Environment, as well as share their experiences with both the other MOOC participants as well as their own Personal Learning Network. A MOOC is all about connecting to others to strengthen learning and knowledge creation/exchange.

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